Sunday, December 14, 2014

I'm throwing in this prediction right at the top: in 2015-2016 Weaver and Poje will be dropped faster than Cappellini and Lanotte. This season's scores and titles were/are checkmarks on ice dance's To Do list, and done.

As ice dance judging continues to be unfair, disgusting, and depressing (the Shibs! That was heartbreaking.), and thus upsetting, I thought this "feet only" video post might benefit from comic relief:

Sinitsina / Katsalapov, Rostelcom Cup (full length)

If you watch the feet-only version, the actual skating doesn't become truly dire until after the lift collapses, whereupon you start worrying he's going to slice her shins to ribbons. Full body also shows Nikita skating with an ass jut that makes Dmitri Soloviev's look clenched.

Now Sinitsina & Katsalapov feet only, where you can watch the skates instead of his ass (in a bad way), his facial expressions, and his wildly swinging arms.

And here is Chock and Bates's brilliant winning skate at Rostelcom, feet only:

The lifts in particular. I don't know what these Chock and Bates lifts got at the GPF but the GOE must have been spectacular. Shpilband, he's like a lift magician.

Left hand stapled to her chest seeing as the leftside of Tessa's torso has been amputedI think her photoshopping friend is just trolling at this point.

Speaking of puking sounds, guess what got a couple of 10s today in the Grand Prix Final short dance?

10! Let's have another one. 10!

On the video I watched, the fall happened at 3:11 and they just hung around and walked into their final pose at 3:18. Seven seconds of program in the toilet, why even mention the out of synch twizzles, lackluster lift, and lack of ice coverage, and they were immediately placed ahead of this:

It's that fantastic element GOE Chock and Bates deliver.

More later.
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*First it was a documentary. Then a reality show. Now just a show. Next it'll be: "Our acting debut!"

Friday, December 5, 2014

The ice dance results in the Grand Prix series were so egregious it seems (almost) pointless to do more than acknowledge this, while moving on to national championships and worlds. It was demoralizing to watch strong skates vis a vis numerous slow, "meh" skates as they were competed, knowing the irrelevance of performance to the outcome.We'll see how it shakes down in the Grand Prix Final for the teams that were gifted with a berth, and by that I mean, which teams are in favour enough to stand on the second and third tiers of the podium.We all know it's in the bag for Papadakis and Cizeron. Prior to TEB, P.J. Kwong demonstrated that, unlike last season, not everybody following figure skating got this season's memo:

This is a dance team that has been slowly improving under the radar. I like what I saw in Barrie in October and they followed it up with a win against world champions Anna Cappellini and Luca Lanotte at their first Grand Prix. I wouldn’t have thought necessarily they would qualify for the Grand Prix Final if you had asked me in September. This weekend will tell the tale.

Wait - Papadakis and Cizeron are not the second coming of Virtue Moir, only better? P.J., what have you been doing, looking at the skating? You know better. Last season, you proactively lectured others not to do that. Don't be a hypocrite.

Grand Prix Final?! Grand Prix and World gold. A notch below them will be Weaver Poje, then we'll see which of Chock Bates or Gilles Poirier round things out. Poirier is the only good skater of the four - will that count, or is the ISU all about the big tent?

The scoring this season so far is nearly as revolting as it was last season, with the sole mitigating factor that last season, the greatest ice dancers of all time, who delivered the greatest set of competitive performances of all time, when it counted, in the Grand Prix Final and the Olympics, were fucked over for one of the worst teams of figure skaters, let alone ice dancers, to stand atop any podium anywhere. So bad that the guy on the gold medal-wearing team ducked the question of whether he knew he'd skated a gold medal-winning performance, drawing our attention instead to the real reason they got gold handed to them, namely, the many people who were promised a return on their investment.

This year, it's merely a bunch of wonderful ice dancers really doing it getting thrown under the bus so skaters wheeled around the ice by their partners can dominate. It's merely stuff like Tanith Belbin inaccurately throwing shade at Alexandra Paul for getting dragged around by her partner. Setting Tanith's Charlie Meryl hypocrisy aside, that was pretty rich coming from Ben Agosto's human travel blanky.*

Tessa's tweets often make me think of Tina Fey's memoir, Bossypants, recounting the ways people comment on the scar she acquired at age five, when someone slashed her chin: "'It's so beautiful.' Ugh. Disgusting. They might as well walk up and say, 'May I be amazing at you?'"
And sometimes Tessa's tweets make me feel as if I've accidentally subscribed to a self-selecting, trust-funded, real-world sheltered, sorority sisters' twitter feed, oblivious to the fact that its conversations are visible to the public.

John, the 77 year-old golden-ager value add on Tessa's plane ride. I imagine she's going to steer clear of "from the mouths of babes" anecdotes, but she can still meet unconventional looking people and report how real beauty comes from within.

That's the sort of elite-level, albeit inane, fortune cookie tone she produces, offsetting the purpose of her social media presence, which is her continuously schizophrenic image output:
﻿

Jennifer Lawrence wouldn't sneer at those boobs.
Look at those hips! Tessa's an hourglass and has
had shoulder reduction surgery as well. I think
that last was a bad move on her part. Scott, OTOH, it can't be denied any longerthat that's a whole bunch of summers worth of "summer weight gain." Luckily, these two can gain and, more importantly, drop, 20-30 poundsand back again with the click of a mouse.And despite how .. substantial.. the two of themappear in this image, the background, as is theircustom of the past few months, is skewed and tilted.

and promotional material:

I think we all know to expect increased image consistency in 2015, once the transitional phase is over.

With Virtue and Moir, I'm really looking towards the 2015-2016 season. If they don't compete, one wonders why a couple of married, retired figures skaters with a couple of kids, entering their late twenties, still finds it legitimately necessary, after more than a decade, to conceal their basic status from those incredibly rabid, overly invested, thirty-nine or so uber fans online, and from what these fans might say, think and do, that they don't do now, if the truth were acknowledged. What could happen? These fans might actually think stuff for five minutes before moving onto the next thing. Scott and Tessa would control the version of the truth that came out, including a lying version of the truth, and control any questions asked, including no questions at all. No problem. Maybe the reason is that there's yet another Olympics coming in 2018. And one after that! And after that! Best officially stay in the closet ... forever. Or maybe the exclusive club factor would dissipate, and they do seem to enjoy life in the bubble, along with all their friends, the Canadian media, other people with the same lifestyle - you know, the bubble full of people worth respecting, as opposed to those outside. It's not as much fun if there's nobody outside not (officially) knowing what you know.

Scott and Tessa have roped in what sometimes feels like most of Canada's tiny media/public relations community, its various affiliations, and all of its figure skaters, as collaborators. After the year that's passed, perhaps they want to protect their friends in the media who wouldn't want it demonstrated that, in addition to sucking up to Jian Ghomeshi for years despite believing he's an abusive creep, they all aggressively, downright gaslighted the public into buying into a married team of skaters as a single and dating others team of skaters, to the benefit of the sport of figure skating, which is already bursting at the seams with credibility.

Scott and Tessa have certainly shown themselves huge fans of figure skating so far this season, what with his promotion of curling, her "school > skating", their incredible team spirit during the Grand Prix Series, and only noticing figure skating when they want us, the targets of their lies, to pay to come see them get paid. That's all both figure skating - and us - are worth.